Apple hardware (was: From a NY Times Bestseller)

[Ben Scott]

On 7/11/06, Michael Costolo <michael.costolo at gmail.com> wrote:
> I've seen that WinTel manufacturers can drop in the latest greatest
> Pentium chip but still have their hands tied with the front side bus speed.
> The Macs, particularly on their higher end machines, have had
> significantly faster FSB speeds on their faster systems ...

  Not hard to do when you're still stuck at 300 MHz... <---
factually-incorrect jibe  ;-)

> I've personally seen Matlab code that took a day to run on a dual
> Xeon Win 2000 machine complete in 10 minutes on a Powerbook G4.

  1440 minutes reduced to 10 minutes?  That is 14400 percent.  I don't
think you can attribute that to an increase in FSB alone.  :-)

  Matlab is kind of weird.  (Like most software.)  I know it is
single-threaded, so it runs at the same speed regardless of whether
you have one, two, or 50 processors.  But even that wouldn't account
for that difference.  Given the nature of typical Matlab work (many,
many math ops), I'd guess it was a processor-specific optimization.
Wasn't Apple touting some SIMD thing with the PowerPC for awhile?
That *could* make a huge difference for that kind of thing.

> I was pretty satisfied with that.

  I'll bet!

-- Ben